Family embarks on final journey

Jeff Wilson

Monday, June 7, 2004 | 11:26 a.m.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- As a fragile Nancy Reagan looked on, soldiers and sailors carefully loaded Ronald Reagan's flag-covered casket into a hearse today to begin his final journey, first to a private family service, then to a state funeral in Washington.

Nancy Reagan, accompanied by children Ron and Patti, paused on her way into the funeral home as she passed a cluster of impromptu remembrances. American flags, flowers and jars of jelly beans -- Reagan's favorite treat -- were left along with notes, stuffed animals and candles in the spontaneous shrine.

Nancy Reagan, wearing a black suit and white pearls, read some of the messages.

"Thank you for changing the world," said one handwritten note, and the words "Thank you, Ronald Reagan" were drawn across a map of the United States.

Eighty-five-year-old Peggy Sheffey said she drove to the funeral home from the nearby Mar Vista area of Los Angeles to "just feel closer" to the man she had never seen in person.

"He's a wonderful man," she said, putting her hand to her chest and choking back tears. "He was so real, absolutely real. Down to earth. He didn't just think of himself. He thought of everybody else."

The body of the 93-year-old former president was being moved from the funeral home to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Following a private ceremony, it will lie in repose at the library through Tuesday night, giving Californians a chance to pay their final respects to the man who was their governor from 1967 to 1975.

On Wednesday the former president's body is to be flown to Washington, D.C. Following a Wednesday night ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, the body will lie in state there.

The national funeral will be Friday at Washington National Cathedral; President Bush will deliver a euology and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev will be among the mourners. The body will then be returned to Reagan's library in Simi Valley for a private burial service.

Mourners also gathered at Reagan's boyhood home in Dixon, Ill.

Ken Dunwoody, who grew up outside Dixon, said Reagan, while an icon of Republican politics, transcended political partisanship. "I just think of him as being an American," said Dunwoody, 82. "I wish we all could get back to that."

The Reagan family's spokeswoman said Nancy Reagan was thankful for the thousands of expressions of sympathy and, despite her sadness, relieved that her husband was no longer struggling with Alzheimer's disease.

When Reagan announced in a letter to the public in 1994 that he had Alzheimer's, he said he was embarking on "the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life."

"I can tell you most certainly that while it is an extremely sad time for Mrs. Reagan, there is definitely a sense of relief that he is no longer suffering, and that he has gone to a better place," said spokeswoman Joanne Drake. "It's been a really hard 10 years for her."

In a piece written for Time magazine before Reagan's death Saturday, Nancy Reagan remembered her husband as "a man of strong principles and integrity" who felt his greatest accomplishment was finding a safe end to the Cold War.

"I think they broke the mold when they made Ronnie," she wrote in the article appearing today. "He had absolutely no ego, and he was very comfortable in his own skin; therefore, he didn't feel he ever had to prove anything to anyone."

Former President Jimmy Carter said Sunday that the death of Reagan, who defeated him in the 1980 presidential election, was "a sad day for our country."

"I probably know as well as anybody what a formidable communicator and campaigner that President Reagan was. It was because of him that I was retired from my last job," Carter said before teaching Sunday school in his hometown of Plains, Ga.

Bush, in France to commemorate D-Day, recalled that 20 years earlier Reagan had come to Normandy on the anniversary of the June 6, 1944, invasion.

"He was a courageous leader himself and a gallant leader in the cause of freedom, and today we honor the memory of Ronald Reagan," Bush said.

In an essay on the op-ed page of today's New York Times, former Sen. Bob Dole wrote that "Ronald Reagan is smiling upon us today because we are working on what he could not complete."

"Not only did he use his grace, charm, wit and indomitable optimism, he used his strength of character to convey the greatness of America," Dole wrote.

Reagan will be buried in a crypt beneath a memorial site at the library some 45 miles north of Los Angeles.

A curved wall adorned with shrubbery and ivy lines the memorial and has a three-line inscription from Reagan: "I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there's purpose and worth to each and every life."